Welcome to another edition of "From Our Shelves," where I highlight and write a short review of a book I have read from our collection. February is Black History Month, so this week I read Allow Me to Retort. In this book, Mystal takes on a big challenge: debunking the myth that the U.S. Constitution is an inclusive and infallible document. In reality, as Mystal demonstrates and carefully explains in the book, the U.S. Constitution is a document designed to preserve White supremacy at the expense of Black people, and pretty much every other "minority" group, but Mystal for now focuses on Black people, which is a big task in itself. This may also be a good book for reading groups and clubs. It offers good arguments supported with solid evidence, and it has just a touch of snark to make it easier to read.

See below for the book's library catalog details.

 

 

Cover ArtAllow Me to Retort by Elie Mystal
Call Number: Stacks 342.73 M998a 2023
ISBN: 9781620976814
Publication Date: 2022-03-01
Allow Me to Retort is an easily digestible argument about what rights we have, what rights Republicans are trying to take away, and how to stop them. Mystal explains how to protect the rights of women and people of color instead of cowering to the absolutism of gun owners and bigots. He explains the legal way to stop everything from police brutality to political gerrymandering, just by changing a few judges and justices. He strips out all of the fancy jargon conservatives like to hide behind and lays bare the truth of their project to keep America forever tethered to its slaveholding past. Mystal brings his trademark humor, expertise, and rhetorical flair to explain concepts like substantive due process and the right for the LGBTQ community to buy a cake, and to arm readers with the knowledge to defend themselves against conservatives who want everybody to live under the yoke of eighteenth-century white men. The same tactics Mystal uses to defend the idea of a fair and equal society on MSNBC and CNN are in this book, for anybody who wants to deploy them on social media. You don't need to be a legal scholar to understand your own rights. You don't need to accept the "whites only" theory of equality pushed by conservative judges. You can read this book to understand that the Constitution is trash, but doesn't have to be.